For the last several years, SIOP has put great effort into emphasizing the prosocial side of our field.  This involves both science and practice that seeks to benefit others and/or society as a whole. It has included SIOP’s Veteran Transition Project, the Poverty Research Group, the Vol-unteer Program Assessment project, and many other individual projects led by SIOP members. SIOP also partners in multiple ways with the Global Organisation for Humanitarian Work Psy-chology in fulfilling their mission to bring together I-O and other areas of psychology with de-liberate and organized efforts to enhance human welfare. Our role within the SIOP United Na-tions Committee is to represent SIOP as a consultative nongovernmental organization (NGO) for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in promoting I-O knowledge in ways that will assist in the attainment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; and, con-sistent with SIOP’s participation in the UN Global Compact, to support initiatives that promote principles of human rights, labor fairness, environmental sustainability, and anticorruption.

Generally, in statistics, the relationship between two variables, x and y, is represented by a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r). However, it can be challenging for nontechnically savvy audiences to interpret the coefficient without extensive statistical knowledge. I-O practitioners often find themselves in situations where they have to deliver the results of correlational analyses to key stakeholders (e.g., company executives, board members, clients) in a nontechnical way. When presenting to senior leadership the results of the criterion-related validation study of a newly developed personnel selection test, I-O practitioners some-times discuss either the magnitude of the correlation coefficient (r; which in the 16 years of the authors’ combined practical experience has rarely made an impact) or a coefficient of deter-mination derived by squaring r. I-O academics face a similar situation when explaining the magnitudes of correlation coefficients to new students and individuals without statistical knowledge. In fact, the issue of communicating I-O findings to outside audiences has gained enough traction to merit a creation of a new column in TIP, Lost in Translation (Litano & Collmus, 2016). It is a common practice to report r2. Although widespread, this approach is mis-leading, because it may limit the interpretability of the statistic (Ozer, 1985; Schmidt & Hunter, 2014). Thus, neither of the aforementioned methods are effective in answering the bottom line question: Can the value of x predict the value of y?

Interest inventories have long been used in conjunction with assessments of other con-structs to understand career exploration and career choice. Recently, a number of researchers have called for increased utilization of interest inventories in personnel decision making, yet this call has received limited attention in Industrial-Organizational (I-O) psychology. I-O psy-chologists with expertise in employee selection and/or EEO law were surveyed. I-O experts in-dicated interest inventories may have incremental validity over traditional selection instru-ments and that interest inventories are unlikely to result in employer liability; experts identified potential uses of interest inventories in I-O applications other than selection. However, experts perceived interest inventories to have limited expected utility for personnel selection. That these latter perceptions are inconsistent with recent meta-analytic evidence supporting inter-ests as predictors of important individual and organizational outcomes indicates the need to educate I-O psychologists on the utility of interests in employee selection.

In recent years, the integrity of our scientific research has been called into question by the popular press who has asked if the scientific method is flawed (Lehrer, 2010). This assertion has been examined by many researchers as well (e.g., Bedeian, Taylor, & Miller, 2010; Kepes & McDaniel, 2013; O’Boyle, Banks, & Gonzalez-Mulé, in press). These authors have argued that the current states of I-O psychology and management are flawed for several reasons. First, the theory fetish (Hambrick, 2007) in our field is making it nearly impossible to publish null results or replications, which has prevented us from developing solid theory (Cucina & McDaniel, 2016). Second, for academics, the necessity to publish for tenure, retention, promotion, raises, and so on encourages researchers to engage in questionable research practices (QRPs) if the obtained results do not align with a priori expectations or do not reach statistical significance (e.g., Banks, Rogelberg, Woznyj, Landis, & Rupp, 2016; O’Boyle et al.). 

Gerard (2016) presents a case for the value of the critical scholarly tradition to work psychology.  The term “the scholarly tradition” is essential.  It denotes that the approach is more about a philosophical orientation than, say, a highly prescribed set of methods of scientific inquiry and it denotes that several theoretical variations are subsumed under that label.  Critical theory applied to understanding works of art, for example, rests on different foundations than critical theory applied to organizations, but both bring in social, political, and cultural backgrounds to interpretations.  But how applicable is critical theory to the psychology of work?